Negative Reinforcement University

Negative Reinforcement University

Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was conceptualized by a team of four students and one faculty at Scottsdale Community College as an aid for learning one of the more challenging concepts in Introductory Psychology. NRU features a game-like 3D environment, itself an exercise in behavioral psychology, that features an experiental simulation, a lab to explore scenario examples, and a testing room.

Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was conceptualized by a team of four students and one faculty at Scottsdale Community College as an aid for learning one of the more challenging concepts in Introductory Psychology. NRU features a game-like 3D environment, itself an exercise in behavioral psychology, that features an experiental simulation, a lab to explore scenario examples, and a testing room.

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Discussion

Discussion for Negative Reinforcement University

Jay Holden
(Staff)

NRU is a tutorial, simulation & lecture/presentation of a school setting where you, the student, are taught and tested on negative reinforcement using a "lab", a "classroom lecture" and a "test" which are all interactive. These styles of teaching the concept of negative reinforcement do a fair job, and the homepage provides an ok description of the material and other concepts that relate to the material (Punishment, Positive Reinforcement, Extinction). However, it takes much longer to "experience" or walk through this simulation than it would to simply learn the material in a more classic presentation. I feel after thoroughly completing this tutorial that there would be some benefit to assigning it to students of an introductory level college course or in high school psychology, but overall students would find it frusterating in that it is excessively time consuming for the amount of material it attempts to teach.

Technical Remarks:

Walking through the tutorial takes way too long and becomes frusterating quckly. The Quality of content is good. The Effectiveness as a teaching tool is okay and the easy of use is frusterating and time consuming therefore poor Overall the simulation is okay, and I realize that when it was made in 1996 that it would be considered a great accomplishment, however 12 years later I feel that it does not hold that same strength. p.s. if you do not want to spend the time finding out the code to get out of the dungeon or into the other rooms the sequence is triangle, circle, triangle, circle, circle,